Most of the similarity models seem to be limited to quantify the degree of overall change rather than being able to qualify different types of semantic change.With the exception of [1]} making the rather coarse-grained distinction between cultural shift and “regular processes of linguistic drift”. Similarity metrics, in particular, were shown not to distinguish well between words on different levels of the semantic hierarchy [2]}. Thus, we cannot expect diachronic similarity models to reflect changes in the semantic generality of a word over time, which was described to be a central effect of semantic change [3]}. Additionally, they often pose the problem of vector space alignment (especially when relying on word embeddings), occurring when word vectors from different time periods have to be mapped to a common coordinate axis [4]}.
